


Ahsoka in Chains

by Merfilly



Series: Ahsoka's Nightmare [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Blood and Violence, Dark, Harm to Children, Implied Relationships, Mention of Barriss Offee, Mention of Darth Vader, Minor Character Death, Other, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-15
Updated: 2016-08-15
Packaged: 2018-08-08 21:50:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7774993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merfilly/pseuds/Merfilly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A month after the initial Order 66 went live, Ahsoka Tano's luck is finally out, and she winds up captured by the Empire. A series of scenes on how that goes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ahsoka in Chains

**Author's Note:**

> Mind the tags. This is canon taken a little farther, darker, though I'm still ignoring Asajj's death.

All it took was one mistake. One attempt to sleep, to try and get ahead of the fatigue that even her best skills with the Force could not hold at bay. She came alert, running without a thought of trying to fight in her exhausted condition. She never even saw the troopers coming at her from two other directions, closing the net around her completely.

"Stun only! This one's wanted alive!"

The trapped fighter bared her teeth, igniting both lightsabers she had liberated along the way, but there were too many of them, and she was too underfed, too worn out. As she went down hard, her montrals rang loudly with the impact of her skull on the duracrete, giving them more than enough time to collar her, bind her wrists and ankles, and strip her weapons away. The pair of lightsabers, a small holdout blaster, and her hunting knife vanished, leaving her defenseless in enemy hands.

"Put her in a tube for transport, so she can't use her powers," came another voice, this one clearly reaching deep in her soul to tear at her sense of reality.

A _vod_ was in that armor. The blank, undecorated, impersonal armor of the Empire.

"Better knock her out first; she's highly dangerous."

The pain that flared at the base of her skull, where the lek attached there, reminded her all over again that they knew her weaknesses before everything went black.

+++

The tube, as Ahsoka Tano learned when she came conscious, was a containment device that eliminated every single one of her senses. It was completely dark, soundless, tasteless, and what she could touch gave her no seam to focus on to force it open.

Within moments of being awake, Ahsoka's mind was trying to claw out of her body in fear and anger alike, as she reacted poorly to being trapped and enclosed kicked in. She struggled to find some way out, something she could manipulate, but the tube was solidly designed to evade even a Force user's ability.

/Calm, you have to calm, 'soka,/ she told herself, trying to head off the panic. She didn't need to think of the weapon factory. Thinking of that added to the confinement, made it worse as memories of her betrayer filtered in.

 _You are going to die in here,_ the ghost-Barriss of her mind whispered, taunting her.

Not for the first time since the horrible ripple of deaths had begun, the month before, she reached out, touching that bond that had been dormant in her mind ever since her choice to walk away.

//MASTER!// she cried, not knowing what else to do, hoping and praying there was an answer this time—

— and roiling, black anger poured into her, accompanied by pain unlike any she had ever known, throwing her right back into unconsciousness.

+++

They put her in with others, in a cell on some world she could not identify. Gravity was higher here, the air thick with noxious fumes, and she could feel the press of misery in the local people outside the facility they were in.

Her eyes skimmed over her cellmates, all of them younger than she was, and her soul cringed. She knew them all, had helped care for a couple when she had still been an initiate. Not a one of them looked her in the eyes, and they all had injuries. She made her way closer, hating the way they flinched, and let the Force guide her to the one most in need.

"Don't," the boy said, when he felt her trying to heal him. "You will need your energy for yourself," he added, before coughing violently.

"I do not know how not to help others first," she said. "It's not what I was taught."

"Then you will break fast," a listless, dull-eyed girl told her.

"We can make a plan, figure a way out of here!" Ahsoka insisted. "We're not even Force-blinded!"

"That's because they use it against you," the girl answered her.

+++

The girl's words rang in Ahsoka's head for days as she came to understand the _haran_ she now lived in. The stormtroopers came in with electrostaffs to cut her out of the group, and the boy that she had given aid to when she was first thrown in. They were both forced to a room where a Dark Acolyte waited, the Sith energies rolling off of him to Ahsoka's senses. She had managed some sleep, but hadn't been fed.

"Tell us where the other Jedi scum are," the squad leader said in the voice of a _vod_ , and Ahsoka's head jerked back defiantly.

"I am no Jedi, so why should I know where any are?" she snapped.

The Acolyte moved then, striking with a vibro-whip on the boy's exposed back, causing the youth to cry out and flinch… but the agony of the strike flowed directly into Ahsoka, pushed back at her using the network of healing energy she had spared the boy so recently.

"You will tell us where to find them, or he will pay for your silence."

+++

When the pain grew to be too much, whether it was through one of the others that she had stubbornly healed, or as the _vod'e_ , the broken ones who knew nothing of tattoos and paint and dreams of freedom, worked her over with blades and whips, her mind sometimes still reached into that bond.

Her pain was nothing compared to what awaited her in that abyss, though, and she only found herself reaching when she was at the end of her ability to withstand the beatings. Invariably, the turbulent rage and pain combination inside that bond would knock her out, and she would have respite, for a time.

+++

When Ahsoka first came, there had been five other prisoners.

She had lost track of how many sessions she had been through, but they were down to her and two others now. Two had died, but one…

…one had given themselves over to the Acolyte and been taken away to serve the Empire. It had sickened Ahsoka more than anything else she had seen, even as she felt fear that she would crumble. After all, Barriss had cracked and turned against everything she'd known and believed in, and Barriss had been a healer!

Would she break? Would she become that same cauldron of hatred that was sitting in the back of her mind, the one she feared and yet clung to, because it meant he was alive, and she might have hope?

+++

The day the nightmare ended was the day Ahsoka Tano killed a man who had once been a _vod_ to her with her bare hands and teeth. The absolute lack of identifying tattoos and lost personalities had kept her from knowing for certain who any of the clones among their captors were.

Joc had been with her on JanFathal, though, and she knew the shape and size of the scar marring his shoulder far too well to not recognize it when torture was pushed to a new level, one that left her more in the fight mode of her resistance than normal. Despite the torturous cutting wire that had been wound around her lekku to make her more easily controlled, she struggled with him. In her condition, he was the stronger, but she had no intention of letting him do this to her.

She reached into the cauldron of rage that was the bond in the center of her mind, but not to let it black her out. For the first time, she let the rage spill directly into her, guiding her grasp of the Force to new levels. His throat was close, and she attacked there first, startling him enough for her to get her hand down, reaching and tearing at his flesh.

The other guards and the Dark Acolyte responded, but it was already too late for Joc. His blasters were near, and she set about using them, giving herself to the Force, her survival instincts meshing with the power of her master's rage and pain. The attempt to get hands back on the cutting wires only infuriated her more, and all reason fled.

+++

She couldn't call it a landing, but she walked away from it. Fortunately for her, the flight path she had unconsciously programmed had been erratic enough to buy her time. 

The tiny life capsule she crashed in broke away from her, letting her stagger toward her haven. That she was only wrapped in a blanket that she'd found on the ship she had stolen marked her out as a victim to attack, yet none who saw her dared to do so. The Force was still thrumming wildly through and around her, something respected by this enclave of survivors. Fleet feet did take word back to their leader, who came swiftly.

"Well, aren't you a fine mess, darling?" came the throaty challenge that finally snapped something of Ahsoka Tano's mind back into place.

Ahsoka looked at the pale woman, blinked, and then sagged to the ground unconscious.

"But I won't let any one else hurt you further," Asajj Ventress murmured, gathering the young Force user to her for the trek back to her home.

+++

She'd been imprisoned for most of three galactic months. Asajj could heal her body, remove the wiring that had embedded in her lekku, even make her sleep, but she could not heal the trauma of the spirit.

"That is a bridge you must build for yourself, my darling," the elder woman counseled after one particularly difficult nightmare and screaming fit. "But you will. Because you are Ahsoka Tano, and nothing breaks you forever. I should know; I tried hard enough."

Ahsoka half-smiled, bitter and longing for the days of open warfare those words called to. Those days had held _aliit_ with the _vod'e_ and her master had been a mostly sane and stable focal point for her.

"Teach me how to wall off a bond, then," Ahsoka said, raising her chin.

"Easier to teach you how to break it, dear," Asajj answered that.

"No… someday, I will want it. Until then, though, I need to block it, so it can't take me over like it did in that prison." She only had flashes of memory from her escape, but the taste of human blood pouring into her mouth would never, ever leave her.

"You already have a plan, don't you?" Asajj's pride in the young woman was palpable.

Ahsoka Tano's eyes glinted. "I'm going to find the right points of leverage, and break everything they made out of their victory," she said fiercely.

Asajj smiled more fully for those words, and set about doing what she could to help her young student and unlikely friend survive the storm she would soon set loose on the galaxy.

**Author's Note:**

> vod = brother, vod'e = the brothers, haran = hell, aliit = clan


End file.
